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Rules for Gun Safety

1) Handle all firearms as if they were loaded!

Never forget that a gun has the potential to cause serious injury or death in a single instant of carelessness.

Make safe gun handling a habit to be followed at all times. After you determine that a gun is unloaded, continue to handle it as though it were loaded.

2) Always keep your firearm pointed in a safe direction!

In selecting a safe direction, you must also take into consideration that a bullet can ricochet or glance off any object it strikes, and that bullets can penetrate walls, ceilings, floors, and windows.

3) Keep your finger out of the gun’s trigger guard and off the trigger until you have aligned the gun’s sights on a safe target and you have made the decision to fire!

By keeping your finger completely outside the trigger guard until you have aimed at the target, you guarantee that any shots you fire will go safely in the direction of your intended target.

4) Always be certain that your target and the surrounding area are safe before firing!

Remember that a bullet can travel as much as several miles, so you should be certain of what your bullet could strike before you pull the trigger. Never fire at a movement, a noise, a flash of color, or a rustling bush without positively identifying your target

Thoughts on the Call to Boycott the NRA

Calling for a boycott of the NRA after a madman with a gun slaughtered innocents in a school is like calling for a boycott of AAA after a madman with a motor vehicle slaughtered innocents on the streets of New York. Both groups are advocates for millions of their law-abiding members & neither group condones violence against others in any form. I don’t recall any calls for a boycott against AAA – do you? Of course not. This is just another example of media & liberal bias against legal gun owners. In both cases the killings were carried out by evil criminals, not by law-abiding responsible people & not by the gun or the vehicle.

Thoughts on the Florida Shooting

THEY KNEW, AND DID NOTHING . . .

And 17 people are dead.

They knew, because Nikolas Cruz told the world he was going to do it. Yet no one stopped him.

The FBI knew. The local police knew. The school knew. The students knew. YouTube knew. Instagram knew. And yet no one in authority acted to prevent him from carrying out his lethal threats.

Nikolas Cruz told the world via YouTube that he was going to be a “professional school shooter” and that he wanted kill a lot of people. Referring to the 1966 Texas tower shooter, Cruz said “I’m going to do what he did”. He posted pictures of himself armed with guns and knives, masked, and threatening. He bragged about wanting to kill and his social media showed him aiming a rifle out of a window, poised to shoot. He posted photos of animals he had killed, a known symptom of an individual who is seriously psychologically disturbed and has the propensity for violence against people.

Nikolas Cruz could have been stopped, but once again the government failed to act against a known threat. All the warning signs were evident, and if any one of the federal or local institutions had acted, Nicholas Cruz might have been stopped. He did not hide his obsession with violence and weapons of all sorts. He was expelled from school for fighting and threatening students, and banned from carrying a backpack on school grounds. Before this tragedy, students voiced that if someone was going to shoot up the school, it would be Nikolas Cruz. He fit the classic definition of a mass casualty killer: “loner”, “weird”, and “a bit off”. He was in mental health counseling at some point, but so far no information related to that has come out.

Nikolas Cruz had contact with local police 39 times since 2011 for violent behavior – child abuse, elder abuse, out of control behavior, & cutting himself. He was in & out of the Florida mental health care system, but no one deemed him to be a threat.

In September – six months ago! – an alert citizen in Mississippi reported Cruz’s threats to both the FBI and YouTube. YouTube removed the video. The FBI interviewed the person who made the report and checked some databases, but apparently took no further action to identify the source of the threat. Had they vigorously investigated it, they surely could have positively identified Nikolas Cruz as the threat and taken action to coordinate with local law enforcement, warn the school, take Cruz’s weapons, or flag him in the national database used for background checks related to firearms purchases. Their failure to act resulted in yesterday’s tragic loss of life.

And the greatest tragedy of all, just 6 weeks before Nikolas Cruz’s cowardly attack against innocent students & teachers, he was reported to the FBI by someone who knew him. The caller gave the FBI Cruz’s name & location. The caller told the FBI that Nikolas Cruz was behaving erratically & possibly planning a school shooting at his old high school. And the FBI did what? NOTHING! They did not refer it to their own field office. They did not contact the local police or the school. They allowed 17 people to be slaughtered by a madman.

Of course the rallying cries for gun bans and gun control are already being trumpeted across the airwaves. But had such laws been in place, would it have prevented Nikolas Cruz from killing? Probably not. He would surely have found another way to kill as other crazed killers have done – ramming a vehicle into a crowd as was done in New York, setting bombs as was done in Boston, using a shotgun, a knife, a machete, or other weapon, or releasing an airborne toxin inside the school.

The loss of life at the hands of Nikolas Cruz is not the fault of the gun – rather, it is the fault of the government institutions that fail to sufficiently fund law enforcement and mental health programs that can identify and act against threats like Nikolas Cruz. Government needs to stop wasting our tax dollars on frivolous, wasteful “feel-good” programs and redirect those funds to the woefully underfunded law enforcement and mental health organizations and programs nationwide. Equally to blame is the current climate of political correctness that prevents good people from speaking up about potential threats for fear of being labeled a “hater”, a racist, or a bigot. One of the best tools law enforcement has is the eyes and ears of good citizens who have the courage to report potential threats.

Wake up America! Fix our law enforcement, mental health, & school systems! “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”